DEVCORE won the second championship for Taiwan this year after last year in the Pwn2Own hacker competition.

(Figure DEVCORE)

The Pwn2Own Toronto 2022 Vulnerability Research Competition, the world's highest hall of white hat hackers, just ended last week. This year, DEVCORE, an attack-oriented information security company from Taiwan, defeated 35 other teams from 14 countries and won the championship.

At the same time, this is the second time DEVCORE won the championship and the title of Master of Pwn after winning the first championship trophy in hacker competition history for Taiwan in 2021 Pwn2Own, writing a new page for Taiwan's hacker history.

The Pwn2Own competition is an annual hacker challenge organized by the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) bug bounty program, inviting top white hat hackers from all over the world to find 0-day vulnerabilities from widely used software and mobile devices.

This year's Pwn2Own Toronto 2022 is the competition that has attracted the most teams over the years, with a total of 36 teams signing up. It is regarded as the holy grail in the hacker world by white hat hackers.

Please read on...

With the global post-epidemic recovery, new work modes such as home office and hybrid office continue unabated. In addition to the original 6 major points categories, this year's Pwn2Own competition added a new SOHO SMASHUP point category to the competition system. This category simulates small In office and home office (SOHO) scenarios, participating teams need to hack routers from the external network (WAN), and then transfer to the internal network (LAN) to hack second devices such as smart speakers, NAS devices or printers.

Through the combination of Mikrotik routers and Canon printers, the DEVCORE team became the first team to win the first SOHO SMASHUP combination points in this year's competition.

This is the 4th time for the DEVCORE research team to participate in the competition. The participating team is composed of information security researchers Orange Tsai, Angelboy Yang, Meh Chang, and Nini Chen. The team successfully won the championship with a total of 18.5 points and won a total of 142,500 US dollars ( NT$4.37 million) prize money, and ranked first in the daily scoreboard during the four days of the competition.

The equipment covered by the scoring project includes: HP Color LaserJet Pro M479fdw printer, Canon image CLASS MF743Cdw printer, Lexmark MC3224i printer, Sonos One Speaker voice-controlled smart speaker and a set of SOHO SMASHUP combination credits.

Cai Zhengda, the chief information security researcher of DEVCORE who led the competition, shared his winning experience and said that he was honored to participate in the Pwn2Own 2022 hacker competition with the team again and won good results. In the future, he will continue to improve attack methods and convert them into simulated attack detection in the drill service. To ensure the provision of the most up-to-date proactive information security services, to help customers master new attack methods and effectively defend against hackers one step earlier.